This invention relates generally to knowledge management systems, and particularly to the development, use and maintenance of knowledge base systems.
One environment in which knowledge management systems are particularly useful is the computer product support industry. The computer systems on today""s desktops are complicated. They involve many products (hardware and software) from many vendors. The products may or may not operate as expected when configured into a system. In addition, the user guides and references for the products are often incomplete and not always accurate. When end users have problems with their computer systems, they often need help diagnosing and then solving the problem. The computer product support industry has developed in response to that need. When a caller into a technical support organization reports a problem with a product in a certain environment, a technical support representative, sometimes known as an agent, diagnoses and attempts to solve the problem.
However, a mountain of knowledge is necessary in order to provide support for computer products. End users"" answers might be found in a public document, or in a customer""s or vendor""s confidential information, or in a company""s bank of general or confidential knowledge. In addition, through support interactions, a company generates a vast array of knowledge, particularly in areas such as product interoperability. Knowledge is always being generated because the resolution to an end user""s problem may even need to be pieced together from many sources of information, public and private combined.
A computer product support provider""s challenge is to handle the increasing technical complexity of support delivery while keeping service quality and customer satisfaction high and costs low. Companies must establish a support infrastructure that enable them to capture, refine, and publish customer service and support information with greater efficiency through a variety of support channels. Adopting a knowledge management approach is an effective means to meet urgent customer demands.
One part of the knowledge management approach is the development and maintenance of knowledge bases as a part of a company""s knowledge management system. With the proliferation of information that is needed to run businesses today, many companies are turning to knowledge base systems to store and provide access to its information. Knowledge bases provide a framework for collecting, organizing and refining the full range of information that is both collected and generated daily by a company. Knowledge bases process the new information, transforming it into actionable knowledge, present it in a consistent format, and make it readily available. They make a company increasingly effective in gathering and leveraging xe2x80x9cinstitutional memory.xe2x80x9d Thus, knowledge bases provide a company with the opportunity to reuse the knowledge that it collects and creates. Such reuse is beneficial because it allows companies to use its data to conduct is business more quickly and efficiently than previously possible.
While knowledge bases provide some real benefit to companies that invest in their creation, they are expensive in time, resources and money to develop and maintain. Once deployed, knowledge bases need careful maintenance to keep up to date. Even when a company incorporates its new knowledge into a knowledge base, thus reusing its knowledge, sometimes its business needs change, rendering the knowledge base not as useful as it had been in the past. The knowledge base may not be used as often as it should be. It is sometimes difficult to determine whether the knowledge base is being used appropriately for the business objectives of the company that developed it or for the customer for which the company developed the knowledge base.
It is therefore an object to treat knowledge as an asset that provides a substantial competitive advantage, and to leverage knowledge to improve customer satisfaction. It is an object of this invention to develop knowledge management systems that allow a company to manage the knowledge it collects and creates, make it available for use it in conjunction with the other systems and processes used by the company, and monitor its use.
In accordance with the present invention, there is described a method of monitoring knowledge use by an entity by measuring use of a knowledge base in which is stored the knowledge. First at least one characteristic of the use of the knowledge base is defined, then at least one metric for measuring the characteristic is developed. From data about the use of the knowledge base, data is collected on the characteristic and, using the metric, a measurement of the characteristic is created. The measurement is then monitored to monitor the use. In the preferred embodiment, the metrics are organized into a metric matrix to identify the metrics and facilitate reporting and analysis of the knowledge use.
In one embodiment, one of the metrics is a domain use rate metric. The domain use metric is a percentage calculated from the number of times that the knowledge base is queried in response to a request for information about a domain, compared to the total number of requests for information involving the domain for a selected period of time. Another metric is an agent use rate metric that is a percentage calculated from the number of agents that have queried the knowledge base in a selected period of time in response to a request for information, compared to the total number of agents responding to requests for information on a domain.
A third metric is a knowledge hit rate metric that is a percentage calculated from the number of times that an acceptable resolution is found to a request for information when the knowledge base is queried, compared to the total number of times that the knowledge base is queried, for a selected period of time. A fourth metric is a knowledge turnaround time, which is the average time elapsed from the time that a suggestion is made for new knowledge to be incorporated into the knowledge base until the time of availability of the new knowledge in the knowledge base.
A fifth metric is a measure of growth of the knowledge generated and incorporated into the knowledge base. In the preferred embodiment, growth is measured in absolute and relative terms. The measure of absolute knowledge growth is a count of the number of new knowledge objects added to the knowledge base in a selected period. The measure of percentage of growth of the knowledge is a percentage calculated from the absolute knowledge growth, compared to a count of the number of existing knowledge objects in the knowledge base at the beginning of the selected period of time.
In the preferred embodiment, knowledge is developed in response to requests for information at the request of a second entity, and one metric is a knowledge delivery volume, which is a measurement of growth of the knowledge delivered to the second entity. The knowledge delivery volume is a count of the number of new knowledge objects delivered to the second entity in a selected period of time.
Also in the preferred embodiment, the monitoring of knowledge use further involves reporting on the use of the knowledge base using a reporting system that compiles instantiation reports and aggregation reports. Instantiation reports documenting individual instances of the use, the reports identifying for each instance of access to the knowledge base at least one query presented and resolutions suggested by the knowledge base. Aggregation reports track for a selected period of time the number of times an event occurs in use of the knowledge base. They are created by polling selected counters that keep track of the number of times the event occurs.
In accordance with a further aspect of the invention, there is also described a method of improving the operational performance of an entity by developing processes to build and sustain use of knowledge by the entity. The steps involve developing systems to facilitate reuse of the knowledge, especially storing the knowledge in a knowledge base and monitoring the use of the knowledge base in the manner described above. The monitored measurements are analyzed to analyze the knowledge base use; and knowledge base use is then analyzed to analyze the operational performance.
In accordance with a further aspect of the invention, there is also described a method of monitoring the operational performance of an entity, involving monitoring knowledge use by the entity by measuring use of a knowledge base in which is stored the knowledge, and by evaluating knowledge generated by the entity for efficiency of the generate and quality of the generated knowledge.